Like flies hovering around a pile of buffalo chips, the question hovers over Fargo, North Dakota: Did the Bison women's basketball team buy its fourth straight Division II national championship?
Since the NCAA shifted to the Elite Eight format in 1994, neither the tournament nor the title has gone to anyone other than North Dakota Stae. Head Coach Amy Ruley and her Bisons won the '94 and '95 crowns in front of more than 7,000 screaming Fargo fans, and 1996 would be no different.
Last year's D2 record attendance of 7138 made Portland State the definite underdog in that game, and it was no different this year.
Shippensburg, Pa., was the designated victim in a 104-78 rout led by seniors Lori Roufs and Jen Rademacher. Roufs finished with 28 points and 10 rebounds while Rademacher had 15 points and five assists. The only two seniors on the Bison roster returned to the game with 1:36 left and Rademacher then punctuated her career with a three-point exclamation mark that gave North Dakota State (30-2) its 100th point of the night.
Kasey Morlock had 21 points for Shippensburg (28-6), which reached the finals by defeating Wingate (NC) 78-64 and Abilene (Tex.) Christian 84-81.
The home team stomped Portland (Ore.) State 91-65 and Delta State (Miss.) 93-72 to delight the fans, who packed the gym each night.
"In all divisions, money talks," concedes Pam Gill-Fischer, the senior women's administrator at UC Davis and District 8 representative to the NCAA D2 basketball committee. "That's not true in the Regionals, where geographic location and seedings are what count after you make a minimum bid. But in the nationals ..."
The NCAA would have to be crazy, or very rich, to turn its back on the Fargo fans. As Sports Illustrated noted a few years ago, a national championship game featuring the state's beloved Bisons will draw 1 percent of North Dakota's 643,000 people. When the locals were outsed in the semis in 1988, only 3,100 made it down to see Hampton and West Texas A&M slug it out.
"The committee is concerned in light of the advantages that go with the home court, but we're trying to look at the promotion of women's basketball in Division II. It's important for the tournament to be financially successful if the bracket is to ever be expanded. So far, it's hard to go away from a place that can provide a sellout crowd and live TV,' said Gill-Fischer.
And give the Bison their due. They've proven to be an ungracious guest as well as an inhospitable host, winning at Bentley College in Massachusetts in 1993 and at Cape Girardeau in Missouri in 1991.
What's more the home court doesn't guarantee a title, though it definitely helps. The bottom half of the 1996 Division II bracket is exactly the same as the final four in 1992, and that's good news for Delta State, which silenced the Fargo fanatics with a 65-63 championship game win four years ago.
